We’ve discussed how to get started building passive income for financial freedom in a previous post. Now I’d like to rank the various passive income streams based on risk, return, and feasibility. The rankings are somewhat subjective, but they are born from my own real life experiences attempting to generate multiple types of passive income sources over the past 16 years.
Be professional. When you submit a résumé, don’t type it in ALL CAPS and please don’t avoid the caps lock like the plague. Know how to use it without looking incompetent. Write in complete sentences with proper grammar. Of course, there will be exceptions, but even with the exceptions, you must keep it professional. You’re building their view of you.
Use Swagbucks for your online searches. Swagbucks is something I don’t use as much, but I do occasionally earn Amazon gift cards with very little work. Swagbucks is just like using Google to do your online searches, except you get rewarded “Swagbucks” for the things you do through their website. Then, when you have enough Swagbucks, you can redeem them for cash, gift cards, and more. You’ll receive a free $5 bonus just for signing up today!

CIT Bank offers an interest rate of 1.85% on money market accounts — more than 15x the national average. Just like with a checking or savings account, your money is FDIC secured, there are no monthly service fees, and you can access your funds any time. All you need is $100 to open an account and start earning more money on the cash you already have.

Given the growth in the sharing economy, your junk can start to pay for itself. For example, if you have some awesome vintage furniture inherited from your grandmother sitting in a storage unit, you can rent this out to photographers for their “styled shoots” which are becoming all the rage. If your furniture is more modern but you still can’t bear to get rid of it – perhaps a home stager will be interested.
This is something like Experts Exchange, except that it’s more general in nature. As a professional in just about any field, you can offer your expertise on JustAnswer. They are looking for professionals in various fields who will provide answers to reader’s questions. You can make money online by answering these questions and pointing people in the right direction to get the solutions that they need.

I am an English major and a herbalist with so many ideas and no extra income to fulfill them. I recently started renting my extra apartment in the attic with Airbnb. It’s amazing how fast I accumulated some money for few hours of work between guests. Now I want to persue all my dreams of opening an online herbal store, publishing my ebook of treating Ulcerative Colitis with herbs, blogs, and videos, and pretty much all of the ideas mentioned here. I will save this article as its really helpful for whomever needs some ideas…

For non-tech people (myself included), web design can cause a lot of stress. And stress means opportunity. If you have a knack for web design or web development, you should definitely be capitalizing on it. And since it’s such a foreign concept for many, it can be a really lucrative side hustle. You can find all sorts of gigs on Upwork. Also, you need to read this article: How to Make $5,000+ a Month Building Websites Part-Time

A freelancing service is something that can, with the right strategy and action, turn into something more productized and passive. Brian Casel, featured guest on SPI Podcast Session #158, talks about how he was able to turn his stress-inducing one-on-one design service business into something that was actually more productized, passive, and profitable. I highly recommend you listen to that episode if you have a service-based business and you feel stuck.

Do you enjoy fast food or going into retail shops? Many companies hire mystery shoppers to test the customer service of their stores. A common one is Subway, which hires mystery shoppers to ensure that "Sandwich Artists" are following all the franchise guidelines. If you have time and can travel to different places, this could be a good side hustle.
Upwork: This website offers a great marketplace for selling just about any professional service. You don't need a merchant account, website of your own or anything else for that matter. All you need to do is be able to provide a high-quality service at a reasonable price. But be informed, you will have to compete with many others that are constantly bidding on open jobs.
For my family. I live in New York City, but my grandchildren live in Rochester. Swagbucks helps pay for me to visit them every 3 weeks. I 'm also able to buy them gifts using Amazon gift cards, and help out with diapers and personal care items using CVS gift cards. I even use Target gift cards to help out with grocery shopping. Swagbucks has been a blessing and I can't live without it!
You can work as a virtual assistant through dedicated websites, such as Upwork or Zirtual. All kinds of skills are needed, and compensation can vary anywhere between $10 per hour to $100 or more. Obviously, the higher pay will be to people who have more technical skills, such as web building skills and marketing. But you can find work doing administrative tasks at the lower end of the pay scale.
Mechanical Turk is Amazon's take on micro-jobs. These are small miniscule-jobs that you can do for other people, which they call HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks. These are super simple tasks that anyone can do. Some examples are listing off some URLs with certain kinds of images for one cent, or recording a few phrases with a microphone for 6 cents.
Could you make an extra $200 per month? Sure. How about an extra $1000 per month? How would that change your life? To most, it would make a monumental difference. But what if we were talking thousands more per month or even tens of thousands more? How would that alter the trajectory of your life? Clearly, you can make money on the internet. You just have to decide how much of your time it's worth.
Answer surveys. Survey companies I recommend include American Consumer Opinion, Survey Junkie, ProOpinion, Pinecone Research, Opinion Outpost, Survey Spot, National Consumer Panel, VIP Voice, Earning Station, and Harris Poll Online. They’re free to join and free to use! You get paid to answer surveys and to test products. It’s best to sign up for as many as you can as that way you can receive the most surveys and make the most money.
Unfortunately, I can’t answer that conclusively one way or the other. It all depends on you, what you like to do, your work ethic, personality, etc. If you are a good writer perhaps you could write a book and make money that way. Or, you could start your own website and do affiliate marketing. Just because you are young it doesn’t mean you can’t make money doing at least a few of these ideas. I wish you luck in your money making efforts!
While writing also falls under the category of an actual work at home job, it can be great for extra cash, too. Particularly content sites. These are sites that post writing assignments for any of their approved writers to grab, and for most you only need average writing skill to become an approved writer. While the pay isn't fantastic, if you can write fast, you can for sure earn substantial extra money. Most of these sites will pay a penny per word or more:

Often, what happens is that we run into unscrupulous Internet Marketers (IMs) who have less-than altruistic intentions of extracting money from you rather than helping you to make it. However, this isn't something new. People have been falling for networking marketing, pyramid schemes, and affiliate marketing scams since before the start of the net.

If you want to add a little excitement to your passive income investing, meet Lending Club, the web-based peer-to-peer lending platform where investors looking for high-interest opportunities provide the funds for loans. You can earn interest rates in excess of 10 percent a year – about 10 times what you will earn on more conventional interest-bearing investments.
The Lake Tahoe property continues to be 100% managed by a property-management company. It feels amazing not to have to do anything. I can't wait to bring up my boy this coming winter to play in the snow! I could go up this winter, but I want him to be able to walk and run comfortably before he goes. I've been dreaming of this moment for over 10 years now. The income from the property is highly dependent on how much it snows. Summer income is always very strong.
Multi-vendor marketplaces, like ThemeForest, can be very successful. Chose a niche and create a vendor website for it. Your marketplace could be anything, from a platform for local artists to sell their work on, to an online digital product store. Once set up, invite people in that industry to sell their products on your site. You take a percentage of their profits when items sell.
But when so many turn down leasing one and one-half acre for one Wind Turbine for each 80 acres, that lease certainly does not materially affect the rest of the Farm or Ranch grazing pasture and the lease pays much more than the farm crow or grazing pasture lease, just because some lawyer said the lease was too long: 30 years plus 30 year option = 60 years, and the wind turbine company has selling production/electricity contracts for the next 150 years – which is needed to obtain financing!
You can make extra money left and right if you just know where to look. If you like to ‘tinker’ I’d suggest going to the DIY section on Pinterest. You can find thousands of projects there to make, and you can sell them at a nice profit. You can make 20, 30, or 50 bucks at a time, in real money. Not the ‘get rich online now!’ stuff you see around. I make old teapots into lamps, or old shirts into aprons and sell them locally on Kijiji or Craigslist. It’s totally doable.
Could you make an extra $200 per month? Sure. How about an extra $1000 per month? How would that change your life? To most, it would make a monumental difference. But what if we were talking thousands more per month or even tens of thousands more? How would that alter the trajectory of your life? Clearly, you can make money on the internet. You just have to decide how much of your time it's worth.
The reason I consider dividends artificial and believe they don’t matter is because you can just as easily reinvest your dividends. If a stock is worth $100/share, I don’t care if it issues a $1/share dividend or if the share price instead increases to $101/share – either way, I have the same amount of money, because there’s no difference to my net worth whether I take the dividend or sell part of a stock.
While this isn’t exactly a long-term solution for making money (since you have to pay it back), it is a reliable way to get some extra cash when you’re in a pinch. It’s also a great way to make money by saving money if you use a personal loan to pay off high-interest debt, such as credit cards. Since getting a loan is one of the easiest ways to make extra money, we felt we had to include it.
Investing in real estate: Investing in real estate offers more passive income cash potential - but more risk - than investing in stocks or bonds. You'll need substantial amounts of cash to invest in buying a home -- it usually takes 20% down to land a good home mortgage loan. But history shows that home prices usually rise over time, so buying home a for $200,000 and selling it for $250,000 over a five-year time period, for example, is a reasonable expectation when investing in real estate.
There are many things that you can do as a virtual assistant. You can manage the social media of a business, website, etc. (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and everything else), handle the newsletter, work on the website, proofread and edit, do market research, handle emails, and so on. The list is really endless. Are you interested in becoming a virtual assistant? Don't forget to also read about what exactly a virtual assistant does.
If you have an eye for design and some experience of creating websites, then you could offer your services as a freelance web designer. You will need to create your own stylish website and have a few other projects that you can show potential clients to demonstrate your skills. You will also need to initially spend time emailing businesses to promote your services and find work.

The first step is to get your domain. For the loooongest time ever, my blog was known as senseofcents.blogspot.com. I finally bought www.makingsenseofcents.com and haven’t looked back since. I don’t think anyone has ever said “I regret buying my domain and looking more professional.” If you sign up using my Bluehost link, then you will receive your domain for free.

There are so many investments that it’s tough to know what a safe and reliable on is. Personally, I recommend index funds for this. An index fund invests in many of the largest 500 companies in America. Over the last 100 years, and the last 20 years, and the last 10 years, you’re very likely to see a return of about 9 or 10% after fees. These are much safer investments than buying stock in an individual company.

If this is the first time you are hearing about this, though, then we actually do not recommend trying it. The average skill level of players on the Internet has improved so much over the past few years that it’s virtually guaranteed that a new player will lose money over the medium to long-term. But hey, Ben made upwards of 6 figures playing online in poker in college, so we had to list it. 🙂

Every one is looking for ways to make an extra income including me. Personally I started my search journey 3 years ago when I were in debit of $10000. I started by taking Survey, listening to the Radio and reading Emails. There are a number of websites that will pay you to listen to the radio, read advertiser’s emails and take surveys. I’ve tried about a million of them, but there are only a few of them that I would recommend. Inbox Dollars is one of those companies.
If you live near a university, there are likely all sorts of research studies looking for participants. While I was an undergrad at Virginia Tech, I got paid $500 to participate in a 6-week dietary study. The study provided all my meals and paid me, but I had to eat a 5,000 calorie diet of 50% fat for 6 weeks, plus I had multiple muscle biopsies, urine/blood testing, etc.
Etsy: While Etsy's popularity has declined recently, it's still a great resource for selling handmade items online. No need for complex ecommerce sites or merchant accounts or any sort of automation. The company takes a commission of every sale and charges a small listing fee per item. But many still use Etsy as their primary source of income. The best part is that you can also sell digital products on here such as poster designs.